Por Alexandre Cabral (Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço e Laboratório de Óptica, Lasers e Sistemas – Dep. Física, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa).

Abstract: ESPRESSO, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, is a high resolution Echelle spectrograph that was installed in the most advanced astronomical observatory, the (ESO-VLT) European Southern Observatory - Very Large Telescope, in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

The instrument has seen first light in November 2017, and was subsequently commissioned. The scientific exploitation of ESPRESSO started in early September 2018, being the instrument now offered to the whole ESO community.

The consortium is composed with institutes from Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, Spain and also ESO, and Portugal had the responsibility to building the component of the instrument that brings together the light from the four VLT's 8-meter telescopes, allowing observations with an equivalent of a 16-meter-diameter telescope, biggest collecting area in the world until the arrival of the extremely large telescopes in about a decade.

One of the main objectives of ESPRESSO is the search for rocky exoplanets in the habitability zone of its stars through the technique of radial velocities. To achieve this goal, it can detect stellar velocities with a precision at the 10 cm/s level with the largest resolution achieved so far.

In this seminar we will describe the instrument, the Portuguese component of its construction and some of stories behind the development of such a large and complex system.

Short bio: Alexandre Pereira Cabral is a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL).

He holds a PhD in Physics, a MSc in Physical Engineering - Instrumentation, Metrology and Quality and a graduation in Technological Physics, all degrees obtained at the FCUL.

From 1991 to 2008 he was a researcher at INETI, the National Institute of Engineering, Technology and Innovation and in 2009, together with the Laboratory of Optics Lasers and Systems (LOLS), he was integrated in the Physics Department of FCUL.

His research activity has been focused on optics, namely in the development of instrumentation for astronomy, metrology for space instrumentation and holography for security applications. Besides LOLS, he is also a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA), was a member of the IA coordinating commission (2015-2018) and is currently the responsible for IA’s Instrumentation Group.